With the development of communications technologies, a software-defined network (SDN) technology emerges, and is generally believed to represent a development trend of a future network. The technology can decouple control logic of a network element from a forwarding function of the network element, and deploys, in a centralized manner, the control logic to a controller, so as to improve efficiency in managing a network.
The Openflow protocol is a typical technology in an SDN network; in the protocol, an operation is performed, based on a granularity of a data flow, on a packet, and different processing manners may be used for different service data flows. The controller is responsible for determining, according to a feature (e.g. flow matching information) of a packet, a forwarding action of the service flow, and delivering a corresponding flow rule (including flow matching information and a corresponding execution action) to a forwarder. The forwarder stores the flow rule, and executes a corresponding action on a subsequent packet that conforms to the flow rule.
It is found that the prior art has the at least following problems:
A service object of a current mobile network is a user, and a user equipment (UE) of a user may be corresponding to multiple service data flows. A service data flow of the mobile network has an aggregation management requirement for multiple granularities such as a bearer granularity and a public data network (PDN) connection granularity. However, for a manner in the current Openflow of performing an operation on a packet based on a data flow, control of the service data flow of the multiple granularities can be completed only by using control information with multiple data flow granularities, which increases link overheads and has low control efficiency.